This happened on John Cornyn’s watch as chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. While Cornyn did his best to help Specter by urging Pennsylvania congressional Republicans to support him, as I noted in a previous post, his plea fell on deaf ears. The conservatives effectively drove him out of the party. Cornyn tried to play both sides of the street here, pushing his own conservative agenda vigorously while trying to keep Specter viable as a general election candidate, but the party appears to be determined to … well, I was going to say, “eat its own young,” but that hardly applies to the case of the octogenarian Specter. Four other Republican senators have announced that they will not seek reelection. Cornyn does not appear to be headed for a happy tour as NRSC chair.